Quote: St. Etrigan "I don't want to come across as patronising and that will be hard, but the way round the cap is to create your own players. The fact that all clubs have the same amount of money to spend is largely irrelevant. You have to create players from within your own clubs structure who are good enough to play at super league level, not join forces with another club to do this. Hull produce some of the best players at junior level, tap into this and create a team .'"
I think this is both true and somewhat misleading.
First off, an acknowledgement that our youth development has yielded disappointingly little in recent years. The criticism we received in our first few years in SL was unfair, given our standing start. However, at this point it is clear something was wrong. Whether that was a talent pool issue or a system issue, i don’t know. Probably a bit of both, I imagine.
I don’t want to come across as demeaning the achievements of St Helens, Leeds and Wigan, and that will be hard. However, those associated with those clubs like to emphasise the value of their youth development, and imo downplay the value of incumbency as top clubs and their bigger rugby budgets. The last is a more relevant measure than the cap and is a big part of the answer to the question that starts ‘if all clubs are spending the same on salaries...’ For most people it is easier to believe nice things, so there is greater focus on the building blocks of success that are considered virtuous.
We started emphasising bringing through young players in 2012, and that was when we started to go backwards on the pitch. The problem was that we were doing it as part of an effort to build a sustainable business more than to build a successful team, with predictable consequences. Jamie Peacock tried to reboot a gradualist bottom-up approach to team building in 2016. And because it was Jamie Peacock and he was saying something nice, many found it plausible - briefly.
Developing more players would help us, undoubtedly. But when I look for patronising advice, it is from the Calder area - from people associated with teams that are striving to achieve as much as they feasibly can, rather than fannying about trying to indulge somebody else’s fairytale. I know all that sounds bitter, but truly we have that right on this subject.